Rathom came to the United States at the age of 20, already an experienced reporter. He worked for newspapers on the Weft Coast and in Canada and Chicago before he was hired by the Journal as managing editor. Ironically, it was Rathom who hired Garrison to come to Providence as an editorial writer and drama critic, a job he held for three years.
Like Rathom, James Carr Garrison was an old hand at newspapering. He was born in St. Paul, Minn., and
had worked on Wisconsin papers before establishing himself in New York as associate editor of the Press, the World and the Mail. But if journalism was his vocation, politics ran it it close second. lie was the press secretary and virtual manager in 1912 of William Sulzer's successful campaign for governor of New York. It must have gone to his head. The next year, A I Smith, who was then Speaker of the State Assembly, had him jailed for contempt because he persisted in speaking from the floor of the Assembly. Rathom was eager for the United States to enter the war against Germany. An irrepressible ham with a huge ego, he was motivated not only by his strong attachment to Britain but also by his need to enhance the Journal's status, to say nothing of his own. He actively sought out

[ 6 ]

pro-Allied intelligence sources and found them in the person of the British naval attache' in Washington and the Bohemian Alliance, a Czechoslovak spy apparatus.
While he pretended that he had his own operatives, Rathom relied on those sources for the spectacular news "scoops" that issued from his office about German and Austrian espionage, propaganda and sabotage activities and plots in the U.S. and Canada. Rathom delighted in fabricating, for public consumption, tall tales about the exploits of his newshounds. A contemporary group photo of six editorial staffers purports to identify them as a team of derring-do "counterspies."
One of them was Jim Garrison.
EARLY in April, 1920, the News began a new feature on its editorial page as a local companion to the syndicated column of 0.0. McIntyre. Billed as The Listening Post it ranged grandiosely from Garrison's usual political polemics to his bemoaning the sad decline in proper English usage and the even sadder state of the theater in America.
The Listening Post was not, speaking charitably, in any danger of setting the journalistic world on fire. But for his column of May 3, 1920, Garrison had a piece of goods that was different, something he could rely on to stir things up. Custom-tailored precisely to the paper's politics, it was a letter to the editor, but in verse. One can imagine Garrison's glee at receiving this literary manna, abristle with barbs blunt and subtle, all in fluid rhyme and meter. Under a dreary headline, it looked like this:

[ 7 ]